The underclass of the underpass

EXAMINER EDITORIAL WRITER

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 28, 1997

1997-04-28 04:00:00 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- AMERICAN FOLKLORE resounds with railroad songs about rootless men and women. When viewed through the rear-view mirror of nostalgia, their miserable experiences become a romantic celebration of ornery individualism.

In a localized version of "The Wild and Restless Hobo" :

I'm goin' down to Frisco town, where the ladies wear no socks, And little drops of whiskey come trickling down the rocks . . .

Somehow we doubt that future San Franciscans will sing freeway songs about homeless men and women. Their experiences are certainly miserable enough, but no future Woody Guthrie is likely to celebrate anything romantic about the perilous independence of life beneath a thrumming eight-lane overpass.

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When it comes to ornery individualism, however, the homeless of 1997 rank right up there with the tramps who rode the rails with Jack London in the 1890s and the down-and-out companions of George Orwell in Paris and London. Caltrans workers began two weeks ago to roust an estimated 500 grocery-cart nomads from 13 sites beneath the Bayshore and U.S. 280 freeways - and by the weekend new encampments had sprouted.

When he returned, Tamara Watson, 27, said he had been a squatter for four years with two dozen others in a sort of tunnel beneath the offramp of U.S. 280 at Sixth and Brannan streets. "I like my freedom and my own space," he said. "It's more comfortable than a shelter. You have peace and quiet."

He expects to be evicted once a year.

We stick by our strong belief that Mayor Brown should keep his campaign promises regarding the homeless. This doesn't mean begging the Presidio Trust to move the homeless into Wherry housing. It doesn't mean begging Caltrans to leave alone the encampments beneath the freeways. In a city named for St. Francis, a man of compassion, it means supplying decent shelter to anyone who needs a place to sleep.

As for Watson and the other 500 people of the underpass underclass, why don't they find jobs and move into decent housing? Good question, and here's the answer in one of the doublets from the anthem of an earlier era,

"Hallelujah, I'm a Bum" :

Oh why don't I work, like other men do? How the hell can I work when there's no work to do?&lt;